Start Here

These topics introduce TheBrain in the order most people need them. They take you from creating an account and your first brain, through reading the Plex and adding thoughts, to writing notes, attaching files, and syncing your work to your other devices. Read them from top to bottom, or skip to whatever you need.

• Welcome and First Launch — When you're not signed in, TheBrain shows a welcome screen with a login panel, where you can log in, continue as a guest in the desktop app, or explore a public brain on the web.
• Creating an Account — Sign up for a free TheBrain account with your name, email, username, and password, then verify your email to finish.
• What Is a Brain — A brain is a self-contained knowledge space — a network of thoughts and the connections between them. You can have as many as you like.
• Creating a Brain — Make a new brain by giving it a name — that's all it takes to start a fresh knowledge space — or make a copy of a brain's content by importing its brain archive into a new brain.
• Onboarding Walkthrough — The Getting Started walkthrough is an interactive guided tour that introduces TheBrain's basics; it does not start by itself, you start it with the Get Started button on an empty brains list or from the Help menu.
• The Plex — The Plex is TheBrain's signature visual map — the active thought sits at the center with its parents, children, jumps, and siblings arranged around it, and you move through it with the mouse, the keyboard, or touch.
• Creating Thoughts and Links — Grow a brain by creating thoughts and linking them as parents, children, or jumps — or as unconnected orphans.
• Finding and Creating Thoughts — The brain toolbar's search box jumps you to any thought as you type and also searches inside notes and attached files, with exact phrases and AND, OR and NOT; from it you can create a new thought or link an existing one to the active thought.
• Writing and Formatting Notes — Every thought has a rich-text note; format it with bold, italics, headings, lists, code, colors, and alignment, and it saves automatically.
• Adding Attachments — Attach files, web links, and (on desktop) external files, folders, and files made from templates to any thought, from the Add Attachment menu, by dragging files or links in, or by pasting a file, image, or web address from the clipboard.
• Syncing Brains — Sync keeps a brain's local copy and its cloud copy in step; with Sync automatically on, the synced brains of the account you are using sync every few minutes while the app is running, open or not, waiting for a pause in your editing.
• Cerebro — TheBrain's AI Assistant — Cerebro is TheBrain's built-in AI assistant — chat in plain language to ask questions and have it make changes in your brain for you, turn on web search in the chat, stop or continue a response, and undo what it changed.
• Using TheBrain on a Phone — On a phone the Plex fills the screen, a thought's notes slide up over it, and an action bar along the bottom holds the main buttons; the menu, the Types and Tags lists, Settings and your account are behind the two buttons at the ends of the top toolbar.